Five Hours to Hiroshima: On Mistakes and Grace

I have traveled to Japan nearly ten times now. Over the years, I have made friends, learned its rhythms, and come to trust the quiet competence of the place. That trust was tested in a single moment when I left my laptop on a train in Osaka.

One small mistake set the tone for everything that followed. I had boarded without urgency, traveled without worry, and exited without checking what I carried.

I have chosen to live part of my life like a loose garment, worn lightly, not clenched, open to movement, chance, and whatever comes next. Sometimes that posture invites discovery. Sometimes it invites loss.

By the time I realized what I had done, the train was already gone.

The System Held

I walked to the station’s lost and found and called a Japanese friend, who translated my situation to the women working there, what had happened, what the laptop looked like, the large UCLA sticker on its cover. I’ve always disliked stickers, too declarative, too permanent, but that one, loud and unmistakable, became my proof.

The woman at lost and found called ahead. A train worker confirmed the laptop had been turned in.

The system held. The people held. Only in Japan, I thought, does loss sometimes return to you with dignity intact.

The Long Ride

The train ride to and from Hiroshima, just to retrieve my laptop, would take nearly five hours in total—long enough for thought to slow down and deepen. As the landscape passed, I began thinking about Japan not just as a place, but as a people, and about how diaspora works in quiet, unexpected ways.

I thought of Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese American woman born into incarceration, who found her political and moral home alongside Black liberation struggles. She was not Black, yet she recognized Black suffering as her own. She held Malcolm X’s head as he lay dying and whispered, Don’t leave us.

That moment was not symbolic, it was relational. It was the sound of two histories touching.

Diaspora is often imagined as blood or geography, but sometimes it is something else entirely: shared clarity, shared refusal, shared care. In uncommon places and among unlikely people, we sometimes recognize our tribe, not because we look alike, but because we understand the same truths and are oriented toward the same questions of freedom and dignity.

Here, as a foreigner, I can sit in silence. No one asks me to explain my Blackness or perform it. I am simply seen as an outsider and, in that distance, allowed to exist without defense. That space creates room—for listening, reflection, and a quieter kind of solidarity.

The Weight We Pull

Time stretches on a train. It begins to ask questions.

I thought about what I have given my time to, and to whom, jobs, people, ambitions that demanded countless hours I will never get back. Some of those moments I would live again without hesitation. Others I hope never to repeat. I could hear my old friend Bill in my head saying:

“Be careful what you hitch that wagon to.”

None of us are getting out of this alive, and the weight we choose to pull matters.

A Quiet Grace

When I finally retrieved my laptop, I felt relief, but more than that, recognition. A reminder that some of the best lessons in my life have come from happy accidents, from mistakes that force me to slow down and pay attention. From moments when going with the flow does not mean drifting, but trusting.

I was reminded that what we lose sometimes returns, not because we deserve it, but because someone else chose care. And that often, the truest meaning in our lives arrives not through control, but through the quiet grace of what we did not plan.